


See

by salatuh



Category: Black Sails
Genre: Canon Compliant, Gen, Heavy Angst, Hopeful Ending, Suicidal Ideation, shark date episode
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-28
Updated: 2018-02-28
Packaged: 2019-03-25 02:55:54
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,217
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13825002
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/salatuh/pseuds/salatuh
Summary: This is based on a Tumblr prompt: Bottom!Flint wanting to be punished after he shoots the two crewmembers in the becalmed episode.It can also be read as a companion piece to "Us" or as a standalone. :)A/N: WARNING. Extreme angst. There is suicidal ideation. Nobody dies, there is a hopeful ending that is canon compliant-ish. But I will say it again.Suicidal. Ideation. Occurs in this fic.





	See

_Forgive me_. 

Over and over, in his ear— palpitating within his chest, worming into his mind, searing beneath his skin and rushing through his veins like an icy flame of regret. Flint had become her grief and rage, manifest and untethered. 

_Forgive me._

Miranda’s voice ricocheted in his skull like the two shots he fired into his crew as he hauntedly walked away. His words to Silver — that he would do what needed to be done if he could not do it himself, gurgled with the bile that ate away at his baren stomach. He felt their stares, all too fatigued to hold terror and rage— but their fear of him materialized in their brothers’ carcasses. His bullets disgraced their skulls, distorting them into casks for human wine that poured on the parched deck floor. Their eyes bored and carved him out, knowing.

_Forgive me._

His steps hollowly thudded in the scorching, heavy, still air. He reached the Captain’s Cabin and looked down to his hands covered in gunpowder, the pistol shook in the curve of his right palm. He felt he was meeting his impending doom, a final straw. Flint was no longer just the monster to Britain. James had become Grim Death to them all. 

_Forgive me._

He invaded the room with his presence, hot air pressing against the walls, avoiding his form. His undead eyes leaked tears that singed his flesh, eating away his stoic captain’s mask. 

_Forgive me._

He slid down the wall and shook with his hollow sobs— empty, vacant, distant. The scent of gunpowder filled his nostrils while he cried into his palm. 

_Forgive me._

He sat up, one hand on the floor while he stared at the pistol still in his grip  through bleary eyes. Bile rose in his throat like magma. His chest tightened around his creaking ribcage like stretched leather overdried in the sun. 

_Forgive me._

The eyes. So many eyes— of the famished crew, of the townspeople who met their end because of his rage, for  _her_. 

_Forgive me._

There was nothing that forgiveness could do here. Forgiveness didn’t feed starving men. Forgiveness didn’t unscorch innocents. Forgiveness didn’t raise the dead. 

His hands shook ever violently as he raised the gun and peered into its pitch black opening— a dark stare revealing the unknown. He sobbed out at the realization that for all the death defying moments he’d met, he had never stared down the barrel of a gun. 

He closed his eyes and felt the ghosted weight of Gates’ long dead body against his chest. The still warm metal kissed his temple. 

James would return to the sea. Flint would be no more.

A small smile graced his lips. He found comfort in the penultimate fatal promise of becoming nothingness. He took a deep sigh and breathed out while eerily steady fingers squeezed around the trigger. 

But there was no darkness that accepted him into the fold. There was only the dull click of an unloaded chamber. 

His eyes flew open and took in a flood of light from beside him. There he stood, a crutch instead of a leg to keep him steady and a pair of deep blue eyes that took James hostage.

James watched John close the cabin door behind him, the blinding midday sun set away from their eyes as it clicked shut. He had been too enraptured in the darkness, the deep, deep darkness of his mind to hear his own door open and Silver hobble in. 

He pulled the gun away from his forehead, where beads of sweat had miraculously formed despite his parched state. He shook with hitching breaths,  unsure if he was terrified that he succeeded or that he had failed and Silver was not the mirage of steadfast calm before him. 

James cried and shook his head from side to side and offered John the weapon with an outstretched arm. “Do it,” he nodded instead. “Just do it.” 

He lowered his head in waiting, but Silver did not take the heavy gun from his upturned palm. “Please,” his shoulders heaved with the weight of it after days with barely anything to keep his strength going. “I tried. I can’t do it mysehhl—” 

John took up the gun and James winced as his lungs sharply expanded and filled with air… He couldn’t look away from him, his brows furrowed in concentration, disturbance, anger… compassion… understanding… resistance. 

“Do it!” James roared. He moved on his knees toward Silver until he gripped the barrel of the gun with both hands and pressed it to his forehead, dead center. He couldn’t bear to look into those eyes again. “It needs to end. It needs to be over. I need it over.” 

He waited with bated breath as Silver shuffled closer, gun pressed harder against his skull so that he could drop his hands at his sides in surrender at last.

“No.” 

John’s voice resonated, a hard-won match for the images of the dead behind Flint’s eyes. 

But one set of kind brown eyes stared back in his mind as the gun clanked on the floor in the distance. 

 _“Forgive me,”_ she said. “ _It is time for us to part. And it is time to let him see you through this.”_

James trembled from his toes to his shorn head, hands twitching in his lap, mouth slack, swallowing the salt of his tears. 

“I won’t do it. I can’t do it,” Silver said as he knelt with the support of his crutch. “I need you alive.” 

Flint raised his head at John’s warm clasp around his left shoulder. The touch didn’t burn him as he expected it to, even as he flinched away and it stayed stronger still. He couldn’t meet his gaze just yet, instead taking in his ribcage at the opening of his shirt, his pulled back hair, his sallow cheeks. 

“You’re the only one,” John swallowed. “Aside from myself… who is strong enough to do what needs to be done out there for those men. For our men.” 

James closed his eyes and his hands as his jaw clicked. Vulnerability and shame coursed through his veins, but panic was not present as it had been moments ago. John’s words struck a chord deep within. 

“They need us alive. They don’t have the strength to go to the hope out there on the waters,” Silver cryptically said. It was then that James saw the oak wooden rod leaning on the doorframe behind Silver, a sharp harpoon’s edge at the tip. 

“Our men,” James’ voice cracked on the smallest upturn of curiosity. He found a shred of strength to meet John’s eyes again under the shielding of his own brows. 

John quietly nodded with resolute focus, then stood and offered his hand to him. James’ eyes slid to the gun on the opposite end of the cabin then finally came to stand with his hands on his knees while he wheezed to an upright position. 

“There’s nothing in that for you,” John said and took the harpoon in his hand, resolutely avoiding following James’ gaze. “But out there, there’s hope. You’ll see.” 

James followed with balled fists around the air, then stopped when John looked him right in the eye with a lopsided and weak grin. 

“We could feast on it.” 

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading the extreme darkness that is this fic. I don't know what to say except my mind goes to dark places and looks for light to hold onto as a tether. :) 
> 
> Feel free to follow me/hit me up on Tumblr @silversexual :D 
> 
> Best wishes, 
> 
>  
> 
> Maze <3


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